Transmuting Our Blockages
Michael Singer, who I love to listen to due to his comforting frank, Jewish humor embedded in his statements, “if you don’t want to keep your blockages, don’t justify them.” I love his bluntness and his point that any blockage is our own and it's also our responsibility to remove them, or at least try. Our justifications are flimsy excuses, and ultimately the power of choice lies within us. This man went into the woods and meditated for a long time, which I learned from his book Untethered Soul, which I highly recommend.
Justification shows up as blaming others for your circumstance or state of being. Michael Singer warns against positive affirmations, the same way Eckhart Tolle does, as doing positive affirmations means you haven't yet fully accepted the truth of the affirmation within your being. The affirmations are still coming from a place of the ego and not the heart.
Personally, I think positive affirmations are a great tool to override negative beliefs when you are just starting to shift an entrenched neural network. It's a great first step to rewiring your blockages, but the real transmutation occurs once the truth of the new belief fully penetrates your being. It's moved from thinking to knowing. The steps in between can look something like searching for contradictory evidence to show you how wrong your current beliefs are, or writing your honest beliefs down in a journal and then looking at them and seeing how utterly outrageous they seem. Our negative thought patterns block us from our full, radiant life force.
We must aim to transmute the energy by reframing it instead of blaming it on anyone but ourselves. That said, we can’t free ourselves until we look the blockage in the eye. As therapist RaQuel Hopkins eloquently articulates, it’s not just about understanding our blockages and challenges, it’s about building our inner capacity while we hold and deal with these challenges and blockages to move through them with more grace.
Ultimately, both are talking about transmutation. The definition of transmutation is:
"The action of changing or the state of being changed into another form." - tOxford Languages & Google
As Einstein famously said,
"Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another." - Albert Einstein
We can release our blockages by shifting the mindset. In doing so, we don’t negate our hardships; we expand through them.